Lesson 24 - The Minor Scale

Lessons of The Week was a series of guitar lessons circulated in "News", in the pre-web days of the Internet. 29 lessons were written before it died out, and I happende to write the first three. They represent a little bit of internet history, as they may have been the first guitar lessons written for the internet.

The lessons were all written in txt format - they were written around the same time as Tim Berners Lee were sitting in Switzerland specifing the first version of html. I have converted them to html, and may have added a few links from the lessons.

Hey kids, my name is Ky, and I am going to teach you the Minor scale! If
you are confused and/or discouraged by the discussion of the various
"modes" or "scales", then this lesson is for you! The minor scale is very
popular in heavy metal, as well as a lot of other types of music. So even
if you don't care for heavy metal, you might learn something! To me the
minor scale sounds sadder, more emotional than the major scale. Check out
some previous lessons for a discussion of the major scale.

I will go out on a limb and say that 95% of all heavy metal is in either a
MINOR key, or in the CHROMATIC key. You are already familiar with the
chromatic key (whether you know it or not!) ... it is simply the collection
of all the notes on the fretboard. The MINOR scale is a subset of the
CHROMATIC scale. Let me also point out that the PENTATONIC MINOR scale is a
subset of the MINOR scale.

Let me now define some important terms:

An INTERVAL is the distance between two notes. Two very important intervals
that you need to know are the HALF-STEP, which is two consecutive notes in
the CHROMATIC SCALE, i.e. two adjacent frets, and the WHOLE-STEP, which
equals two HALF-STEPS.

The ROOT of a scale is the first note of the scale, and the scale is named
after the ROOT note. For example, when you hear a reference to the "key of
B minor" - the B is the root note.

It is helpful to have some kind of map of the fretboard, so that you can
find notes easily. One of the previous lessons contains an ASCII fretboard
map. There is also a PostScript file that creates maps for many different
scales and modes, however, I can't tell you where to get that! I couldn't
find it at any ftp sites. If demand is high, maybe I will include it in a
future lesson.

In our next lesson we will look at power chords, the fundamental tool of
the heavy metal rhythm guitarist! See you then!